Monday, August 29, 2016

Beyoncé rocked the house last night with her performance at the VMA’s, but former mayor and current Queen Bey critic Rudy Giuliani was not quite so impressed.

Giuliani appeared on Monday morning’s Fox & Friends, where he was invited to talk about how Beyoncé used her show as an opportunity once again to make a statement on police brutality towards African Americans. Ainsley Earhardt pointed out how the pop idol invited the Mothers of the Movement as her honorary guests, and that her segment began by depicting her backup dancers as angelic figures shot dead one at a time by cops.

“I ran the largest and best police department in the world, the New York City Police Department,” Giuliani opined. “I saved more black lives than any of those people you saw on stage.”

He didn't actually run the police department, but whatever. More importantly, he hasn't held public office in 15 years and as far as I know he isn't running for one now. So why in the hell is he constantly on TV talking about his resume? He's supposed to be talking up his buddy Donald Trump.

When he was reelected to his second mayoral term in November 1997, New York's Rudy Giuliani stood before the television cameras on election night and, Nixonesque, his arms making a "V" in the air, exalted, "I am the king of the world.," By the following spring, however it was not royalty but a fascist dictator to which Giuliani was being openly compared. Jokes about Benito Giuliani swept through city streets and tabloid newsprint faster than fires through Florida. The governor's office joined in. Even the congenitally sober New York Times asked on the front page of its Metro section whether Giuliani was the Mussolini of Manhattan. Little Hitler jokes were just as liberally sprinkled in especillyt after the mayor announced that he had earmarked $15.1 million of the city budget to build himself a bunker --- a bombproof "emergency control center" --- on the twenty-third floor of a World Trade center building.

There weren't very many African American and Latino New Yorkers thanking him.